The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)(92)

Enrique watched, his eyes widening, as blue light spangled across the stage. More bones peeled off the walls, assembling into ragged skeletons. A harsh scent cut the air: minerals and rain, singed hair and metal. A tremor ran through the earth, the terraces quivered and dirt crumbled down the walls, falling in the space between his shirt and neck. Enrique recoiled, but he didn’t look away from the scene. Tristan, teary-eyed, stood with a knife pressed to Laila. But Séverin … Séverin had been caught. He didn’t know how. They had only just arrived in time to hear Roux-Joubert gloat. To make the world anew. To reset the human race. A hard lump formed in his throat. Enrique thought of the people he’d met over the years. The dark and the fair, the ones whose languages sounded spiced. The ones kept in makeshift villages, commanded to entertain. The ones who watched and jeered or tamped down their horror. The ones who reached for hands they could never hold openly in the street. All of them. Stitches in a tapestry that had no horizon. The Fallen House couldn’t erase them. It seemed impossible … but all Enrique had to do was look at Séverin’s folded-over form to remember. Great gashes in the back of his jacket. A dirtied feather clung to his shoe. Remnants of wings he had sprouted with nothing more than Roux-Joubert’s blood against his torn skin.

Hypnos raised his hand slowly, staring at his false Ring.

“I thought … I thought if anything my ring might be the missing piece to keep the Fragment from waking, but I was wrong—”

Beneath them, Roux-Joubert let out a roar. He raised his hand, backhanding Séverin. Laila looked as if she wanted to scream, but instead, clamped her lips tighter.

“What did you do to the Tezcat?” demanded Roux-Joubert. “The doctor cannot enter!”

Thanks to Zofia’s adhesive and the silver cloth, the Tezcat door hadn’t broken. That was one small blessing. And if the Tezcat door couldn’t open, then whoever was on the other side couldn’t come in … All this time they thought it was just Roux-Joubert and the man with the blade-brim hat.

They were wrong.

The skeletons hurled themselves against the obsidian glass. A fine seam appeared, chunks of it breaking and falling onto the ground. The image of Enrique and Hypnos began to malfunction. They smiled, turned their heads, smiled again. It was nothing more than a mnemo recording splayed across the silver cloth. And yet, with every tear, a new scene took form, showing the Forging exhibition in real time. When they’d left, the exhibition had been empty. But now, they saw the dark shape of a gathered crowd, silhouetted by the dim light of the room.

Waiting.

Waiting to enter.

Séverin screamed as the Phobus Helmet was slammed onto his head. Hypnos leaned forward, nearly giving away their location. Zofia grabbed his wrist.

“Séverin said not to go down there. No matter what.”

“That was before he got caught! He needs help!” said Hypnos. “If the Babel Fragment is awake, then we have to put it back to sleep … it cannot stay like that! The entirety of civilization is at stake, don’t you understand? Can’t you feel it?”

“Think for a moment,” said Enrique, his heart racing. “Roux-Joubert wanted the Horus Eye for something. You said that it would have an effect on the Fragment, remember?”

“But I don’t know what effect that is—”

“You keep saying the Fragment is awakening,” said Zofia. “It is an object. It cannot be awake. Unless you are suggesting that it’s akin to a Forged creature. In which case, it has to have a somno to deactivate it.”

Hypnos squeezed his eyes shut.

“The Horus Eye,” he said slowly. “What if the Horus Eye puts the Fragment to sleep?”

Enrique swallowed hard, turning his face from the scene of nightmares below them.

“It would explain why he wouldn’t want us to have it,” said Enrique. “He wouldn’t want anyone to stop them.”

“What about my Ring, then?” asked Hypnos. “If he already has two Rings, then why would he have wanted mine?”

Enrique’s mouth twisted into a grimace. He thought of the way Roux-Joubert kept hurting Tristan … he thought of Séverin writhing there … the ugly words that left Roux-Joubert’s lips to remake the world.

“Power and greed always have appetites,” he said. “Taking your Ring would be a step toward that.”

Hypnos’s jaw clenched. “Then we must give him what he wants. Or, at least, an illusion of it.”

Enrique nodded tightly. He looked through the hiding place to the Horus Eye lying on the wooden table, all but forgotten. Perhaps Roux-Joubert thought he’d won and that there was no need to protect it, for it wasn’t as though anyone else knew what it could do.

Zofia’s eyes snapped to the floor. She reached for something in the dirt, a trail of pale powder that she pinched and rubbed between her fingers.

“Curious…”

Hypnos cradled the fake Ring to his chest. “We were supposed to take the Horus Eye to the Order. We can’t do that now. And we can’t leave them.”

Enrique stared at the Ring, and then at the brooches and jewels set against the rich velvet of Hypnos’s jacket. A great deal of my inheritance, Hypnos had said. Which meant that it was House-marked.

“If we can’t go to the Order, then we can bring the Order to us,” said Enrique slowly, a plan forming in his head. “Hypnos, give us those. I want to send a signal.”